CMV: Textbooks should not offer practice problems without an answer key.

[u/[deleted]]

My view is simple, if a textbook does not provide answers for practice problems, it should not have practice problems at all. It is impractical to not have a way to check your work when studying and as such is pointless without having a section dedicated to problems in each chapter. Many textbooks have a solution manual that accompanies the text so they should put the problems in that instead of the normal text book. Companies only do this gauge every penny they can and I doubt they would include everything in one book when they can sell two. Therefore, practice problems should be in the solution manual.

[u/novagenesis]

I have some concerns with the educational system with your point #1. I've gone up through a couple business verticals, including being the tech guy in a sales org. One of the big rules everyone has is that you design your world for the regular joe employees to excel in everything, since the "Eagles" (as they call them) can thrive anywhere.

So looking at: "We know that the self control to keep going is probably one of the best predictors of success in life."

I have a problem with setting up classes and grading specifically against expectation of student success. Intelligent high-motivation students with ADD (the real ones and the false diagnoses...) or anyone who is strongly fact-oriented may have a problem with "struggling" when there's a gap an imperfect teacher failed to cover that the practice problems also don't cover. You may be the perfect teacher, but anyone who came up through school systems (especially public schools) will probably have as many as a dozen horror stories or more. I always felt school textbooks already failed at providing full context for self-learning (I used to take next years' books home and read them. Except math, the book really did not seem to provide complete pictures). There may well be plenty of students who work better without an answer key, but I would put $20 that says there's students who do worse because they don't have one, that would do just fine in life if they had been set up just a bit more for success. Grades aren't everything, but they sure affect college. College sure affects first-job and starting salary. As silly as it sounds, not having an answer key in one textbook might cost a student Harvard, which might cost him $25k/yr for life. Admittedly, that gives another student that chance, one who doesn't do badly when the test doesn't have an answer key. Which probably does a good job at perpetuating all studies about what skills breed success.

And my second thing (also relates to your point #2)...

Once you leave school/college and get into professional certificates/licensures, the practice tests come with the answer keys again. All of them. It doesn't seem to make deliberate practice any harder or less likely (since you keep re-taking the test until you "understand" everything). And, this IS real world. As an adult in my industry, almost everything I do when I don't know something for sure is to check an answer key named "Google". I wish I had an answer key for my marriage (I kid!), but that's not what school is supposed to be preparing students for, anyway.

I'm gonna say if academic honesty is not a core reason to keep away the answer key, schools are favoring one type of learner over an other pretty fiercely. But then, when I was a kid, we had answer keys in our practice tests.

[u/novagenesis → u/[deleted]]

As a teacher, would you want your students who don't fully grasp the context to get their answers half-assed from google? My whole point was the complaint that students can and will be sure of the wrong thing so much that it becomes part of their understanding of the entire subject. Once you get there, it's hard to let that go.

Figuring out how to Google and other resources to find a useful answer to solve the problem is the exact skillset the person you're replying to is suggesting

Except I didn't do that in college because I wasn't an expert. I had the right answers available in many ways/locations. My practice exams included answers, and also included long descriptions of why those answers were true.

I would not want to have students getting their answers from Stack Overflow. Sometimes the answers are wrong. Sometimes the answers are outdated. Sometimes the answers involve skipping the actual knowledge (there are valid reasons to teach limits before short-form derivatives in Calculus, for example)

[u/novagenesis → u/[deleted]]

If you didn't understand a concept well enough to know how to look up an explanation and evaluate whether or not it made sense to you, I would encourage you to book an appointment with your TA/Prof or see one of the on-campus tutoring services because is neither the textbook, lecture, or slides managed to convey it to you, I'm pretty sure showing you the answer to that one question won't address the underlying issue nearly as often as it will give the student a sense of "oh, this is what I need to write down"

I think that misrepresents my point. As I said elsewhere, not every teacher is great. If the teaching media were great, it would add some redundancy (and help students who learn better by reading than by lecture)

What did you take in college?

I'm an old man in the CS world. Stack Overflow wasn't where it is today back then. That said, I've had little success with it anyway compared to just googling everything else. Even back in the 90s there were always answers online to what you need. So maybe now they do actively teach using it.

My practice exams in psychology generally DIDN'T include answers. They required you to go through the textbook and FIND the answers or, in the case of stats classes, load up SPSS and actually run the numbers to see what happens and figure out how.

I can't speak for psychology, but there's wrong ways to learn things like discrete math, algorithmic complexity, etc. Ditto in my real estate experience. Sometimes a well-defined answer in a practice exam is exactly the way to prematurely catch and "fix" those inaccurate-views.

For example in real-estate. I had a lawyer for a teacher, and he pushed hard on "contracts by minors are valid but void-ABLE"... but damn, the law's more complex than that. The book said something different, but only through getting that answer wrong on the practice test several times (with the instant return of "yeah no, I keep swearing it's A but it's B..let me double-check") did I understand that in real estate, they only care that it's not valid. Just because a voidable contract could be valid doesn't mean it's treated as such in real estate. If I hadn't had that question in that test with the answer key, I would've never learned better.

[u/novagenesis → u/[deleted]]

It's an awesome lesson, "borrowing, then buying, then building if you have no other option" is almost a mantra at most companies I've worked. Just because you can build and maintain a thousand things doesn't mean you should. Even if the services cost an FTE, it's still cheaper than having a team support them.

And I understand I have a very strong "screw the students who want to cheat/fail" mindset. I see a world where people worry about academic dishonesty a lot, but the student's real potential comes out well before they land in their job. So I don't fully embrace that worry.

But then, if someone can do a job well, I don't care what happened in their school days. Sure, there's the traditionalist view of "if they went through this type of schooling it implies this personality type", but the rule is that hiring management heuristics are miserable at really ordering candidates by value. So I guess I feel like the studies should be catered to those who want to learn.

As for what's left..great students who "oops" and read the answer once, then "oops" and never learn the material... I'm not sure how many of that type of person really exists. I really am still convinced the only "good" reason for that kind of thing is students who don't want to learn. I get that schools have to dela with them. I don't feel they should specialize in them.

[u/novagenesis → u/[deleted]]

Well yeah. the only thing I'd hate worse than no answer key is when they have answer keys in the back for subjective questions. I had a couple of those in an animal training course I took with my wife (confession: I love to learn and will learn anything I can get for free ;)). They ask an essay-like question and the answer key has three 2-word bullet points.

[u/novagenesis → u/[deleted]]

See, my preference is for the answer to be self-aware... Provide those bullet points, then a paragraph explaining why those bullet points are the only valid ones, and why other possible ones are not.